End of the year!

Wow.  I’m so, so, so far behind on posting to this blog.   Here’s another attempt to do some catch up before the year is over, so this will be a bit random as things come to me.   Hopefully I’ll do a New Year’s Eve post reminiscing on 2012 in general so I don’t want to do that now.  I just want to talk about what’s happened since the last time I posted.

For one thing, Thanksgiving happened.  It was a blast.  My nephew from Denver came down with his wife and two daughters and stayed with me for three days.  The girls are shown clowning around in the picture below.   My parents and sisters and brother and his wife and son came to the new house also on Thanksgiving, so I had a houseful.  We had a big Thanksgiving meal – my parents essentially bringing the contents of their kitchen with them and cooking in my kitchen.  If you’ve read this blog much, you know my idea of cooking involves a microwave, so you understand why my parents had to bring so much stuff with them.   It was a lot of fun, and felt like a good way to break in the new house. 

This year I decided to put up a Christmas tree, which is something I haven’t done in a lot of years, but again, I wanted to break in the new house.  Plus I have so much nice space for a Christmas tree.  And so many ornaments that I’ve collected over the years and been saving in boxes in my garage.   So I put one up, which you can see in the first picture.   I’m enjoying it a lot.

A couple of weeks ago I had a brief power outage and it kicked my sprinkler system out.  Since I have it set to only water every third day, it took me about a week to realize it wasn’t working.   I’m very proud to say I figured out how to reset the system and get it back running again – just in time to turn it off for three days of freezing weather.

Snow!  I walked out last Monday morning and had a nice layer of snow on my lawn, probably less than half an inch, and big, fat, wet flakes coming down and layering on me as I walked to get my paper.  I was totally surprised.  Yes, the weather had called for a slight chance, but I ignored it since their ability to predict snow here is notoriously low.  It was my favorite type of cold weather.  Pretty, and around just long enough to say “oh, look, snow”, then it’s gone.   I’d be okay with it going back to daily low 70s for the rest of the winter now . . . which it seems to have done for now.  

So that’s basically what’s been happening.  My lawn service has switched from mowing and weed whacking to leaf blowing and garden cleaning. 

Oh!  I almost forgot a piece of big news!  My old house rented!  Yup, there are people living in the old house as of December 1^st.  My agent’s taking care of all of that, so I’m letting him deal with it.  I’ll just be glad to be getting some relief from carrying two mortgages.   Yay! 

I'll be doing a bit of traveling over the Christmas Holiday, seeing relatives who are coming to the metroplex, and relatives in east Texas and relatives in Colorado.  It'll be a little whirlwind, but should be lots of fun too.    I'll try to remember to take pictures.